Hello.

Has anyone here successfully taken a vray scene and exported it to USD from maya and imported it into Houdini and rendered it via karma? Is this possible or will I require vray for Houdini to read the materials? The model is the simple part but I'm not seeing any solutions for getting the materials out to karma. Thanks.

There isn't a good solution for this since in vray people tend to mix and match Maya nodes and vray nodes and even when exported to vrscene file the nodes aren't represented one for one with the same naming.everytime I've tried bring in vray materials from Maya into Houdini either with usd vrscenes or custom scripts it hasn't been successful to round trip them. Recently I did a project with Arnold and had the same experience porting from Maya to houdini, the easy stuff was successful but the hard stuff fails everytime, there's too many edgecases to account for

gashworth
There isn't a good solution for this since in vray people tend to mix and match Maya nodes and vray nodes and even when exported to vrscene file the nodes aren't represented one for one with the same naming.everytime I've tried bring in vray materials from Maya into Houdini either with usd vrscenes or custom scripts it hasn't been successful to round trip them. Recently I did a project with Arnold and had the same experience porting from Maya to houdini, the easy stuff was successful but the hard stuff fails everytime, there's too many edgecases to account for

Thanks for this. It does seem to be an impossible case to try and have a solid flow for USD that is supported by multiple DCCs.

If you can author MaterialX materials/nodes in Maya, instead of Vray materials it should be possible in theory. Likely to be a different matter in practice though!

You can definitely do everything through MatX and USD in Maya and bring it into Houdini and you should render without any issues in Karma.

If you have Vray materials in Maya then you will Vray in Houdini as well to make it work seamlessly and it will need to be just Vray nodes used but obviously, you won't be able to render with Karma.